To the editor:

The Russian Air Force recently targeted a theater in the city of Mariupol in Southern Ukraine where more than a thousand civilians had taken shelter. Nearly all of them appear to have died. A week earlier, they bombed a maternity and children’s hospital in this same city, killing several people including a pregnant mother and her unborn child.

Meanwhile, UNICEF is now saying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is creating a child refugee almost every second. Over one-and-a-half million children have fled Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion three weeks ago. The total number of refugees has now topped 3 million.

Republican and Democratic members of the US Congress are united in their opposition to the war and the need to support Ukraine (without sparking a much larger European war) and hold Putin and the Russian government accountable.

Despite all of this, Fox News is allowing Tucker Carlson to defend Putin’s actions. In recent days, Carlson has repeated Russian propaganda by claiming “The Pentagon is lying about bio labs in Ukraine” (an absurd lie Mr. Putin has trotted out as justification for the war). He also called, Volodymyr Zelensky, the democratically elected president of Ukraine a “dictator” and claimed the country is not a democracy (once again echoing Putin’s rhetoric). Putin is now encouraging Russian journalists to quote Carlson verbatim.

Mr. Carlson brands himself as “the sworn enemy of censorship.” The irony, of course, is that he is using his freedom of speech to defend a Russian political regime that has shut down independent news channels, is arresting Russian journalists who speak out against the war, and is killing journalists in Ukraine.

We learned this week of the deaths of the independent American journalist Brent Renaud and Fox News camera person Pierre Zakrzewski.

My question is, why does Tucker Carlson still have a job?

It’s time for Fox News to fire him. Mr. Carlson is wealthy and, unlike many journalists in Russia, can easily find other venues willing to publish his work. In the meantime, if Fox News is unwilling to distance itself from Carlson, Americans should distance themselves from Fox News.

Rick Herder

Marshall